Rebate claim tracker
A small system that reads the rebate terms out of a supplier agreement, accrues what you are owed as the purchases happen rather than discovering it at year end, tells you when you are one pallet short of a tier that pays retrospectively, and files the claim with evidence before the window closes. Seven posts on the same system, one diagram at a time, with a cost breakdown and an engineering reference at the end.
- 01
A rebate claim tracker on AWS for a few dollars a month
The whole system on one page — the agreement as a rule, the live accrual, the claim — and why this money is the easiest margin in the business to lose.
- 02
How a rebate agreement becomes a rule
Extracting rebate terms into structured rules, the five fields that decide everything, why exclusions are the expensive omission, and what to do about amendments.
- 03
Why an accrual is not a claim
Accruing on purchase lines, why over-accrual hurts, how proximity to a retrospective tier becomes an alert, and the difference between earned, claimed and received.
- 04
What a claim needs to survive scrutiny
What a defensible claim contains, why the supplier’s figure differs, how to reconcile without escalating, and the difference between a credit note and a deduction.
- 05
How a claim window gets caught in time
Where claim deadlines come from, why two reminders work and daily ones do not, handling agreements you did not know existed, and what the annual sweep is for.
- 06
What the rebate claim tracker costs
About $1 a month. One Bedrock read per agreement is the only line that grows; the queue, the table, the mail and the storage are rounding errors. Plus the three ways the bill could surprise you.
- 07
Engineering reference: the rebate claim tracker architecture
Same system, drawn purely for engineers. Service names, region, Lambda inventory, IAM scopes, the schemas and the exact model id.
Frequently asked questions
- What is a rebate claim tracker?
- A small serverless system that holds supplier rebate terms as machine-readable rules, accrues earned rebate against live purchase data, and produces claims with evidence before each agreement’s claim window closes.
- Why do businesses miss rebates they have earned?
- Because the terms live in a PDF attached to an email from two years ago, the person who negotiated them has left, and nobody is measuring purchases against tiers until somebody asks at year end — by which time several claim windows have closed.
- What is a tier cliff?
- A retrospective tier pays a higher percentage on everything you bought in the period, not just the amount above the threshold. Being two percent short of one is expensive, and being two percent over it is worth far more than the extra purchase cost.
- Why will the supplier’s figure differ from mine?
- Almost always because of definitions: returns, credits, freight lines, promotional stock and excluded ranges. The gap is a vocabulary problem rather than an arithmetic one, and it is why a claim needs the line detail attached.
- What does it cost to run?
- A couple of dollars a month. See part six.